Labor mobility buffers cascading supply-chain losses from occupational heat stress

Abstract

Escalating global temperatures threaten economic stability by worsening occupational heat stress and reducing workforce productivity. Despite advancements in macroeconomic modeling, current risk assessments rely on coarse annual aggregations and ignore internal labor mobility, thereby masking highly unequal sub-national vulnerabilities and underestimating how labor mobility buffers cascading supply-chain losses. Here we present a high-resolution, agent-based dynamic supply chain network model that integrates empirical daily mobility data across 313 Chinese cities to quantify the spatiotemporal cascading economic impacts of occupational heat exposure. We show that annual heat stress costs China 2933.5 billion CNY (2.6% of GDP), with systemic propagation through supply chains driving 59% of these losses. Crucially, labor mobility redistributes risk: net labor inflows into industrialized, high-heat southeastern regions provide a factor-compensation effect that buffers cascading losses by offsetting direct local productivity shocks, saving a net 7.2 billion CNY directly and 24.6 billion CNY indirectly nationwide. Under a 2030 warming scenario (SSP3-7.0), total losses expand 1.6-fold to 4672.9 billion CNY, though integrated multi-level adaptations—combining industrial restructuring with work-hour shifting—can mitigate these future losses by 30%. These findings reveal that demographic mobility dictates the economic geometry of climate vulnerability, highlighting that resilient climate adaptation requires synchronized network-level interventions rather than isolated local policies.